7.3 Defining Your Project: The Big Picture

Lean Six Sigma improvement projects often start because something within the organization or process is not going well. Understanding why the project is necessary and what you want to achieve is crucial for success. You and your team may enter the process with various levels of information. On one side, you may have a reasonably well-defined problem. On the other side, you may have little knowledge beyond sensing that an issue exists because a process’s outcomes are not as expected.

Often, you will enter an improvement project with a direction already established by your organization's leadership. Oftentimes, though, you may need to identify and propose improvements yourself. In such a case, how should you proceed? The first guidance here is for you to select a bite-sized opportunity to get started. Steer away from trying to bite off more than you can handle, as this decision more often than not leads to failure. You can look for processes that present the following symptoms in identifying potential issues:

• High correction rates and rework levels

• Long processing times

• Too many steps in which items go back and forth

• Excessive delays between steps

• Excessive checking

• High levels of work in progress or inventory

• Processes without standard ways to perform work

• Late deliveries to customers

• High levels of customer complaints

Another point that you need to consider is whether the potential project is suitable for a Lean Six Sigma engagement. Upon compiling your candidate list of improvement ideas, you need to assess the contending problems. Here you should rule out any issues that have a clear solution; you do not need to deploy the Lean Six Sigma methodology if you already know what needs to be done. There are three helpful screening questions that you can use. You will have a suitable candidate if the answers to the questions below are, respectively, yes, no, and no:

• Is there a gap between current and required performance?

• Are the causes of the problem already understood?

• Is the solution already evident?

In the Define phase of the DMAIC model, you lay down the groundwork for the subsequent steps by understanding the problem, setting an initial purpose, and getting organized to tackle it. These outcomes require you to create a project charter, identify the customer, define their requirements, develop an initial project objective, and prepare for the Define tollgate.

You and your team will address the following six questions in this phase:

1. What is the problem you need to address?

2. Who are the customers the problem is impacting?

3. Which factors are critical to the customers affected?

4. Which processes are involved?

5. What is your objective?

6. What is your timeline for achieving the objective?